~ Living the Slow life in North Carolina

Saturday morning coffee pot post

Out of milk. I can’t drink my coffee black! I drained the last few drops of milk from the bottle Sandy finished off last night. Better to drink my coffee black, or dark, dark brown, than to not drink it at all though. My main vice these days is caffeine. I’m caught in the vicious circle. Without it, I get vicious migraines. But I get migraines anyway, just not so bad. And I need more and more of it. Then I wake up in the middle of the night. I go to bed early. I get plenty of sleep, albeit light sleep. I get up early. I drink my two big mugs of coffee. On weekdays, I follow this with some kind of cold caffeine. I keep going back to Diet Pepsi. I keep saying that it’s my last one. On weekends, I manage to keep away from the soda because I don’t keep it in the house. I make peach iced tea, or we eat out and I order iced tea.

This morning: pick up milk, go to farmers’ market where my CSA chicken is waiting for me, go to post office to mail Lida’s beans, come home, make meat loaf and put in the oven. Pick, wash, and spin lettuce for a salad. Lay down the latest cardboard I collected this week along the path I weeded a couple of nights ago. Lay down landscape fabric and mulch. Somewhere in here, eat lunch. Admire the Back Forty. Go to Deep Roots for rice, coffee filters, snacks, etc.

Il Sandino will probably be up and at ‘em earlier than usual, so plans may change. But I know that he plans to take me out for dinner for our anniversary tonight. We usually go to one of two places: Bianca’s or Bert’s.

When Stew, Joyce, and Jeff came to the house last night, I picked up Mama Kitty and everyone petted her. She was into it. So I put her down and we were standing in a circle around her. Jeff knelt down and held out his hand. She went to him and he petted her. She was quite a social butterfly. I was well pleased. I feel like ‘Enry ‘Iggins.

My tomatoes continue to die, although I think that I’ll end up with what I need for canning. The Critter dug up my best eggplant and broke it. Damn that Critter! It was the only eggplant seedling that looked healthy. The latest crop of beans are emerging. This weekend I need to mix the rest of my potting soil mix, plant the peppers and cucumbers and rest of the eggplants and tomatoes in containers or whatever spots I can find. Also need to work in some of these worm castings around the tomatoes I have in the ground already.

I have an idea cooked up for a special thank you for Ricë, who, in addition to the cool people stamps she sent me earlier this month, sent me some wonderful vintage alphabet stamps. It will be fun to make this! Also want to get going on the cut-off shorts project she is leading on her blog, and get my fabric Italy travel journal started enough so that I can put the pages in a project bag and carry it with me to stitch on during waits and slow times wherever I am.

Oh yeah! Finish backing and photographing the “By the Sea” woven ATCs, so that I can trade for that beautiful needle felted and embroidered one reserved for me!

Those are the plans. We know that they seldom go that way, but Mama Kitty assures me that it’s okay if they don’t, as long as she gets her daily massage. I think that I’m going to promote her from production assistant to artistic director.